How Owen managed to avoid attending any secondary school classroom lessons in the 1930s...
Ar yer orrite bor?
Hello to you and welcome to my potting shed. First, my top gardening tips for September:
Cut back and remove all dead stalks from herbaceous borders now. Watch out for new shoots such as those from delphiniums. Cut off with a heel of old wood and pot up to make a new plant which you can use to fill a gap in the border in the spring.
Gather in seeds from your plants now and place in glass jars if you are keeping them in your shed so the mice can’t get at them.
Your lawn will have an autumn growth spurt so now is the time to sort out any patchy or bare areas by sowing seed or returfing.
If your lawn is prone to waterlogging, or has lots of moss in it, it may be compacted. Spike it with a garden fork to get water and air through the soil. It may look messy in the short term but this has many long term benefits and is well worth the effort.
Grass cutting always makes me think of my time at Old Buckenham Area School (as it was called then). I went there when it first opened in 1938 aged 13. I’m right proud of the fact I never attended a single classroom lesson there! Bunwell Primary School’s Headmaster, Mr Douglas, recommended me to Old Buckenham’s Headmaster, Mr Twiddy, as a good gardener who would be more useful planting up and caring for the new grounds than in a classroom. That suited me well as I had had more than enough of book learning by then. My first job was planting a lorry load of shrubs – that took me two weeks – and placing a climber at every pillar on the verandah. Some of them may still be there for all I know.
The playing field was huge and one day a grass cutting machine duly arrived. It was my job to cut the grass but I was not strong enough to push the machine on my own so another lad was deputised to help me. This machine was temperamental and lethal – it amazes me to this day that neither I nor my helper were injured using it. I think today’s Health and Safety people would not be impressed at two by then 14 year old lads doing this dangerous unpaid work! I spent a lot of time looking down at the grass as I pushed and noticed there was a large patch that had nothing but four-leaved clovers in it. To this day I wish I had taken some of it for planting in my own garden.
The closest I came to classroom learning was helping the woodwork teacher. The school started a Poultry Club and he needed someone with experience building chicken coops. I used to help my dad make these so I volunteered and made the first ones at the school. I kept chickens in my Bunwell orchard for many years before I moved to Wymondham – you can’t beat a freshly laid egg from your own chickens.
Afore I go I must point out we didn’t have a school bus then. Each day I cycled to and from school from my home on Bunwell Hill – a 10 mile round trip. My pal Reggie and I did a test run to time the journey so we would not be late on our first day. Pupils were given a new bicycle by the Education Authority if they didn’t have their own, plus capes, leggings and caps for bad weather. Every two weeks we had to parade our bikes so a teacher, Mr Thrower, could check they were in good order and had not ‘disappeared’ – in other words been sold on by the poorer families.
Well, I hope you have enjoyed reading my memories. Schools were very different in my day to what they are now – and that may be both a good and a bad thing. Until next time, as we say in these parts, ‘moined ‘ow yer go’.
Owen
(First published in Wymondham Magazine, October 2020)
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